Crack cocaine

Crack cocaine link (drug)
File:Crack cocaine.jpg
A smokable form of cocaine which rose in popularity in the USA in the 1980s after the CIA upscaled the cocaine importation into the US.

Crack cocaine is a smokable form of cocaine. It is highly addictive. The CIA imported a lot of it into the US in the late 1980s, as documented by Gary Webb in his book Dark Alliance.

Preparation

Cocaine powder is easily "cooked" up to a crystalline form, "crack cocaine", which as it is smokable, is reckoned to be more addictive.

Availability

Crack form has been available in USA since late 1984.

Legal position

The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act dramatically increased sentences for this form (a 100:1 disparity, meaning 5g of crack was treated in law as 500g of cocaine powder). This resulted in much longer sentences for drug dealers in the (predominantly, poor, urban) neighbourhoods where crack was sold, and contributed to the racial imbalance among the prison population. The 2010 Fair Sentencing Act modified this imbalance (down to 18:1) but was not applied retrospectively.

Crack epidemic in the United States

The Crack "epidemic" in the United States, the flooding of inner city black communities with crack cocaine, was a deep state operation throughout the entirety of the 1980s and the early 1990s with multiple purposes.

The most obvious purpose was on the supply side, where the CIA upscaled the cocaine importation into the US to create black funds to finance the Contras in Nicaragua and other militias. At the same time, the corruption created in Latin America weakened those societies and made the ruling system more dependent on the United States.

On the receiving end, the importation weakenes the black community, by destroying the social fabric in inner city ghettoes, making organizing political activism much harder. New draconian "War on Drugs" laws, purposefully designed target the black community, led to a large percentage of black males ending up in jail for long periods of time.

Another part of the operation was the flooding of inner cities with guns, sourced via illegal importation of a Chinese automatic weapons, ending up in the hands of gang members In 1997 U.S. Treasury agents arrested suspects with ties to China's state-owned munitions companies who smuggled 2,000 illegal AK-47 rifles that were fully automatic.